and after having for some time served as a juvenile department for Louis le Grand only, it is now an independent establishment for little boys, beginning with primary instruction and carrying them no further than cinquième, when they are passed on, not necessarily to Louis le Grand only,—though the old connection of Vanves with this lycée is felt as a strong tie,--but to whatever school the pupil chooses. Seven hundred little boarders (for Vanves takes no day-scholars) of from five to ten or eleven may be seen here, and a pretty sight they are. The park and garden are quite delightful, and the ground beautifully thrown about; the high hill on which stand the school buildings commands a magnificent view of Paris on the one side, and of the country towards La Celle St. Cloud and St. Germain on the other. The buildings have been of late greatly enlarged, and every improvement in school construction and arrangements, according to the French notions, introduced; and whoever wishes to see French school construction and arrangements at their very best should go and see Vanves. The school is popular, and no wonder; at the lodge at the foot of the hill one sees carriages waiting, and in the glades of the park the mammas whom they have brought may be descried walking with their little boys. Being so young the pupils pay the lower rate (40l. to 451. a year) fixed by authority for the younger divisions in the Paris lycées; but it is on little boys, they say, not yet come to the terrible appetite of fifteen, that the great profits are made; and while many lycées can hardly make both ends meet, Vanves is in the highest prosperity. It is self-supporting, and after paying all its expenses has a profit of 4,000l. a year. Its progenitor, Louis Le Grand, clears a profit of more than 3,000l. Profits of this kind go to the State, the proprietor of the lycées, and are available for the general expenses of secondary instruction. In this way a prosperous lycée helps to pull a struggling lycée through; but a lycée which brings in plenty of money will always be liberally treated for its own improvements and extensions.

Vanves has no day-scholars; its boarders are all housed on the premises, and all pay about 40l. a year. In the ordinary lycées it is not so. These, with scarcely an excep

tion, take day-scholars, and do not themselves lodge all their pupils who are boarders. They all charge a rate fixed by authority,† ranging, for their boarders, from 40l. to 601. a year; for their day-scholars, from 61. to 101. For the boarder this includes everything; his tutor, as we should say, —that is, the professor who gives him the benefit, out of class hours, of certain conférences and examinations, and the répétiteur, who helps him with his lesson, as well as his class instruction and his board; for the day scholar, it only includes his class instruction, and he pays from 31. to 51. a year extra, according to his place in the school, for tutor. This makes a day scholar's expense come to from 91. to 157. a year. Some boys are half-boarders, passing the twelve hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the lycée, getting their dinner and their goûter there, but not breakfasting, supping, or sleeping; these have the full instruction, and they pay from 221. to 341. a year. The externe surveillé is a day-scholar who learns hist lessons in the salle d'étude under the usher's eye, and is thus off his parents' hands the whole day except an hour in the middle of it, but has no meals at the school; he pays, as an ordinary day-scholar with the full instruction, from 91. to 151. a year, and 80 francs (about 3 guineas) a year besides for superintendence.

But all the boarding-scholars of a lycée which takes boarders are not boarders of the lycée itself; and many of the dayscholars of a lycée which takes no boarders are boarders, though not in the lycée. At Louis le Grand, for instance, the greatest of the lycées, there are 800 boarders (internes) and 500 dayscholars (externes); but all these externes do not live at home. Charlemagne and Bonaparte have no internat, they are dayschools; but the population of Bonaparte is thus divided: day-scholars who live at home (of these, 151 are externes surveillés), 707; day-scholars who are at a boarding-house, 493; total, 1,200. And that of Charlemagne thus: day-scholars

* At the College Rollin they are all boarders.

+ Décret du 5 août 1862. In the elementary division boarders pay 401., in the grammar division 44/., in the superior division 487., in special mathematics (where they have, perhaps, the best scientific and mathematical teaching to be got anywhere) 601. Day-scholars pay, in the elementary division 67., in grammar 8., in humanities and special mathematics 107.

who live at home, 200 (70 of them externes surveillés); day scholars who are at a boarding-house, 790; total, 990. A boarding-house of this kind is called in France pension, institution; its director is called chef de pension, chef d'institution.

These establishments are private, or, as the French prefer to call them, free (école libre, institution libre).

F

CHAPTER VI.

PRIVATE OR FREE SCHOOLS, AND COMMUNAL COLLEGES.

PENSIONS OR INSTITUTIONS LIBRES-THE COMMUNAL COLLEGES PRIVATE SCHOOLSTHE SEMINARIES.

PRIVATE

RIVATE or free schools in France are not free in the sense that any man may keep one who likes. To keep one a man must be twenty-five years old, must have had five years' practice in a school, and must hold either the degree of bachelor, or a certificate which is given after an examination of the same nature as the examination he would have to pass for the degree of bachelor. Thus he cannot, as in England, be perfectly ignorant and inexperienced in his business; neither can he, as in England, be a ticket-of-leave-man, for the French law declares every man who has undergone a criminal condemnation incapable of keeping a school. Neither can he have his school-room in ruins or under conditions dangerous to his pupils' health or morality; for if it is a new school he is establishing, he has to signify his intention beforehand to the academic authority of his department, and if this authority makes objection, the Council of Public Instruction in Paris, in the last resort, decides. If within a month the academic authority makes no objection, he is then free to open his school; but it is at all times liable to inspection by the academic authority or the inspectors-general of secondary instruction, to ascertain that nothing contrary to health, morality, or the law, is suffered to go on there. The inspector of a school of this kind does not meddle with its instruction.

Much the most famous of these institutions is Sainte Barbe, near the Pantheon; it is in the neighbourhood of Louis le Grand, and boards a great number of boys who follow the classes of that lycée. Sainte-Barbe answers more than any

thing else I saw in France to a public school with us; I do not mean at all in the mode of management and teaching, which is that of all French schools; but it is not a State establishment, and yet has antiquity, important buildings, a great connection, a genius loci, and general consideration. Its head, M. Labrouste, is a member of the Imperial Council of Public Instruction. Many families which frequent the great classical lycée, Louis le Grand, have used Sainte Barbe as their boarding-house for generations; the Collége Rollin was once held here; and the prosperity of the establishment is now so great that it has recently founded a Vanves of its own. for its little boys at Fontenay aux Roses, near Paris; and Fontenay, like Vanves, is well worth seeing. But just because it has this exceptional character, Sainte Barbe, of course, is not a good sample of the French pensions; neither is it a good example of the French private schools, because its chief function, though it has classes of its own, is to serve as a great hereditary boarding-house to the frequenters of Louis-le-Grand. So I will go elsewhere for specimens of the pension, which now occupies us.

These institutions abound in Paris, and the files of uniformwearing schoolboys whom one meets in the streets are generally pensionnaires going under the care of the master of the pension or one of his ushers to or from the lycée whose classes they follow. The Commissioners will ask, as I did, why, if a boy is not to live at home, but to be a boarder somewhere, he does not go and board at the lycée whose classes he follows. The answer in the case of Sainte Barbe to the question why the institution has the preference over the lycée is, as I have said, old hereditary connection. But generally the answer is this: parents seek a somewhat less vast assemblage of boys, a somewhat more domestic management, and a somewhat more attentive supervision of studies out of class hours than they find, or think they find, at the lycée. At the same time they like the name of the lycée, its guarantees, and its professors. So they send their boy to a pension where he is with fifty, a hundred, two hundred boys, not with four or five hundred; where the master's wife imports the feminine element into the direction of household affairs, and where